


the other side of paradise

by spicyjarvis (orphan_account)



Series: and classic parker luck prevails once again [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), Spider-Man - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Angst, Author Is Sleep Deprived, Avengers Family, Bisexual Peter Parker, C1 IS A PROLOGUE!!!, Deaf Clint Barton, Domestic Avengers, Domestic Fluff, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Gen, Human Experimentation, Humour, Hurt Peter Parker, Hurt/Comfort, Irondad, It isn't HYDRA but it's just as JUICY!!, M/M, Minor Character Death, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Peter Parker Whump, Physical Abuse, Poor Peter Parker, Probably Incorrect Medical Terms, Protective Avengers, Protective Tony Stark, Secret Evil Organisations, The Author Regrets Everything, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony Stark Still Has Arc Reactor, Torture, Violence, YES the title is the song by glass animals, just not in the summary or title!!!, lgbtq+ superheroes everybody!!!!!, spiderson, there are capitals in the fuckin fic!!!!!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-21
Updated: 2019-09-13
Packaged: 2020-07-09 15:38:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 20,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19890241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/spicyjarvis
Summary: five years ago, peter parker died.... or so the world thought.when tony stark discovers him barely clinging onto life in a facility in moldova, he's got some work to do.----trigger warning: read the tags!no far from home spoilers!----





	1. PROLOGUE

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THIS WAS REUPLOADED!!!
> 
> originally it was just the first section, but i decided to take it down and add in the new section to make tony's part in this story clear from the beginning. :T

Five years ago, Peter Parker died.

Five years ago, apartment 23D of the Briarwood apartment complex in Queens, New York mysteriously caught on fire. We say ‘mysteriously’ because, even after all of this time, no one has ever discovered the source of the flame. Investigators and forensic scientists from several different police departments have combed the apartment over more times than one could count on their hands and not one person could tell you how it started, where it started or who started it.

Five years ago, apartment 23D of the Briarwood apartment complex caught on fire and it killed everybody inside, of which there were supposedly only two. May Parker’s body was found only barely recognisable, what with how badly burned it had been in the incident. The only piece of clothing on her body that stayed intact was the Queens Hospital Center name tag, bent out of shape from the heat, reading ‘May Parker - Nurse’ that had probably been pinned to something at some point.

There was no other body they could find in the apartment, but we say that there were two people in apartment 23D at the time of the fire because an elderly neighbour had helpfully told a police officer that she had seen fifteen-year-old Peter Parker enter just an hour before the fire began. They had asked her whether he could possibly have a motive for burning down the apartment, but she knew - everyone who’d ever met Peter Parker knew - that he would be the last person on planet Earth to do something like that.

Five years ago, Peter Parker died, except they only _say_ that because they don’t _know._

They had launched a missing persons investigation. Several officers hypothesised that he started the fire and fled the country. Others thought that he wasn’t there in the first place; that the aforementioned elderly neighbour didn’t actually see Peter Parker enter apartment 23D because eyewitnesses can be unreliable.

They had interviewed everybody who knew Peter Parker - his school friends, his boyfriend, his teachers, the Parker family’s landlord, the man who ran the deli shop he apparently frequented - but this turned up no leads useful to the case. “It’s a shame,” one officer had said to his co-workers over lunch one sleepy afternoon in the precinct, “the teacher who was in charge of his academic decathlon team said the kid really had a future. He said he could’a ran the world.”

Three years ago, the captain of the Queens Police Department declared the case as cold. Not closed, not solved, but cold, because for two years they had been putting energy into a case that was just not turning up any telling leads. “There are loads of missing kid cases like this,” he had told everyone. “This one isn’t anything special.”

That was the end of that.

Except it wasn’t.

One year ago, an officer stationed at the Queens Police Department received a tip from a building company employee working on repairing and revamping apartment 23D at the Briarwood complex. “We found something interesting in the ceiling of one of the bedrooms,” he had said.

“What is it? What did you find?” the officer had questioned him.

“It’s… it’s Spiderman’s suit, sir.”

So, one year ago, the case reopened, and the police force got to work.

The size of the suit - which came out of the apartment fire only singed but deactivated - matched perfectly with the size of Peter Parker’s casual clothing. This wasn’t enough evidence to prove their collective hypothesis on its own, but this as well as the circumstances presented to them gave them no other choice but to believe that the boy who had gone missing all those years ago was also the superhuman vigilante who had tragically disappeared off the face of the Earth.

This was a big, _big_ step in the case, sure, but it ultimately solved nothing. They spent days reviewing CCTV footage of Spiderman’s movements in the weeks following the incident. They questioned the criminals who had been arrested after being foiled by Spiderman. Even the bigshots who were past the point of performing ‘petty crime’ - Doctor Octopus and Electro are examples - had no idea and even expressed _concern_ for the Spider they once called their enemy.

But their efforts turned out fruitless. Nothing was unusual in Spiderman’s routine. He would begin his daily rounds only usually about an hour after Midtown High School’s bell for the end of last period rang. He would stay out until the early hours of the morning breaking up petty crime and assisting the public - you know, carrying groceries for elderly women and the like - before disappearing in the direction of the Briarwood apartment complex.

Ultimately the police force decided that they would not release this information to the public. Announcing who Spiderman is and what they _hypothesized_ happened to him thanks to circumstantial evidence will only decrease public morale and that is the last thing they want. Besides, the force largely respected Spiderman - the least they could do for him, until they find out exactly what happened to him, is to keep the identity he wore a mask to hide a secret.

So, five years ago, Peter Parker died. 

Spiderman died.

Except, they don’t _know_ that he did. What else did they have to believe?

.

Five years ago, Spiderman vanished off the face of the Earth.

Five years ago, Spiderman disappeared and the press were actually quite thrilled about it. This is what initially caught Tony Stark’s attention, because when you’re exhaustingly popular within the media and suddenly they’re all putting their energy on another moneymaker story, you begin to pay attention to those kinds of things.

Five years ago, Tony Stark stopped his whole charade of pretending Spiderman didn’t really make an impact in the city of New York after he took notice of how much the public was begging for his return. This whole charade began in the first place because what does a 5’6” arachnid of a vigilante have when compared to a billion-dollar team of world-renowned superheroes? Why would he even think about the kid running around with a spider on his chest when he was a fucking _Avenger?_

So, five years ago, Tony Stark started digging.

Only, he didn’t pull up much. He didn’t pull up much even after breaking into every single NYPD case file they had on the incident, because they didn’t have much themselves. Whatever happened, whoever happened, it did a good job of covering up Spiderman's tracks, that’s for sure.

One year ago, something changed.

He had been working on a project in his workshop when JARVIS dialled down his music, unprompted, and helpfully informed him of a brand new, growing development on that missing arachno-kid case recorded into the Queens Police Department database.

“Show me,” he’d demanded.

One year ago, Tony Stark rather illegally discovered the identity Spiderman tried so hard to keep under wraps. In the reports, he had a genuine smile and kind eyes and top grades at a top school. He had good friends and a boyfriend and a successful academic decathlon team and they all told the media that they missed him more than anything. It would be lying to say that he wasn’t haunted by the vigilante’s startling youth.

One year ago, Tony Stark learned that Spiderman’s name is actually Peter Benjamin Parker and that he was presumed dead along with his last existing family member after a suspicious fire in apartment 23D in the Briarwood complex. We call it ‘suspicious’ because no one could ever find the source of the flame that caused so much damage. Tony wonders whether or not it was Spiderman himself who did it.

Tony Stark didn’t know why he cared so much about this case and he didn’t know what he was going to do with all of the information he knew. He’s a terrible person by nature, but nowhere near terrible enough to expose Spiderman’s secret identity even after his - alleged - death, so what is he doing looking into this much? Why does he find himself caring so much about the whereabouts of this kid he’s never even met before?

Five years ago, Spiderman disappeared

Five years ago, Peter Parker disappeared.

And one year ago, Tony Stark started caring more about it than he ever thought he could.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> comments are really encouraging for me and much appreciated y'all!!!
> 
> MY DISCORD SERVER:  
> https://discord.gg/SgGFvDC
> 
> MY TUMBLR:  
> https://spicyjarvis.tumblr.com/


	2. CHAPTER ONE

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yeah

Metal feathers cut the air in a whooshing crescendo and Sam touches down onto the rooftop where Clint has been stationed throughout the entirety of the battle. Chest heaving and skin slick with sweat, he rips his tinted goggles from his eyes. “This spot taken?” he breathes out wearily.

“Not at all,” Clint tells him. “You okay?”

“Exhausted.” The wings retract into the pack on his back as Sam sits himself down. “I think I cracked something. Ow.”

That’s fair enough. The dude is only human, after all; they can’t expect him to be able to keep up with a team of aliens, supersoldiers and spoiled billionaires forever. As a highly-trained marksman who never misses a shot, Clint tends to just find a rooftop that gives him a good view of everything and stays there until he can’t. It’s what he’s always done and it’s what he’ll probably do until the day he retires. Call him selfish, but he’d rather leave it to the superhumans to do all of the close combat and take out the strays from afar.

Fingers pulling his bowstring taut, Clint says, “do we know where they’re coming from?”

“Think Tony mentioned something about the sewers. Him, Rogers and Thor went down there not too long ago.”

“Oh, _what_ a classic.”

Their opponents today have proven to be, so far, pretty stereotypical. There’s nothing particularly special about a swarm of oversized robotic wasps anymore. Not only that, but their weak spots are definitely nothing new - getting their heads off or blowing a hole through the power source in their chest is enough to deactivate them close to immediately. Clint can knock out several at a time if he shoots at the right angle. It’s a good thing that he always does.

_“When are they going to stop?”_ Natasha shouts into the comlink, simultaneously startling both Clint and Sam.

The marksman can see the woman on the street, using an overturned hotdog cart for cover and bouncing up to unload a bullet between the eyes of each wasp that flies in her direction. She’s ninja fast and her technique barely slips up as she fights - Clint isn’t afraid to admit that her strength and prowess is straight-up frightening.

_“I think we found the source,”_ Steve says. He’s breathing hard and Clint can hear the water sloshing under his boots as he runs. _“We’re chasing her now.”_

“Her?” Sam probes.

_“Big, fuck-off queen,”_ Tony supplies helpfully. _“The wasps are literally coming out of her ass!”_

Laughter ripples over the comlink and Steve grumbles, _“Tony definitely had a good chuckle about it.”_

_“That’s because it’s funny!”_

Sam pops his goggles back over his eyes and stumbles to his feet. “Wish I could stay and chat but I think Spangles might have an aneurysm if he catches me sitting around,” he says, clamping a hand onto Clint’s shoulder and momentarily shaking his aim.

“Later, skater.”

“In a while, crocodile.”

The wings unsheath and, with a woosh, Sam is airborne. Clint clocks the wasp heading up to meet him from underneath and tags it’s head with an explosive arrow. Clearly not expecting to be attacked by something other than it’s target, the robot rears back moments before it’s decapitated in a blowout of jagged chunks of metal and singed wires. The body takes a swan-dive to the ground and hits the pavement with so much force that it sends cracks five meters up the street.

He works on picking off the wasps that cluster towards Natasha, who fights with a raw intensity exclusive to only her. With three of them occupied with taking out the queen in the sewers, the wasp-to-Avenger ratio is thrown out of proportion even more than it was before, and they swarm to everybody they can spy. Any that come near Clint are dealt with before they can even get within appropriate attacking distance.

_“There are loads out here,”_ Sam observes out loud. _“Way too many for us to cull. Can one of you sewer rats come and give us a hand?”_

_“Certainly!”_ comes Thor’s booming voice, and barely a minute passes before Clint spies the telltale blast of blue lightning instantaneously killing off dozens of the wasps at a time. Having the God of Thunder on their side really is just a blessing sometimes.

“What’s going on with the queen bee?”

_“Wasp,”_ Natasha corrects him.

“Shut it, Nat.”

_“Working on it,”_ Steve tells them, voice strained with the wear of battle. _“She’s really big, but also really fast. We’re going to need to drive her into a dead-end or something if we’re going to get this done by sundown.”_

_“Oh, Rogers, you beautiful fucking genius. J, pull up a map of the sewer system. Highlight the closest dead-end we can drive this motherfucker into.”_

Clint releases the breath he’s been holding for a long time. Finally, he can see an end to this fight. It must have been two or three hours since they first set out to try and cull the swarm. All he can think about is the warm, welcoming embrace of his memory foam, rich person bed back in the Tower.

The volume of the robot wasps in the street gradually decline and it’s a beautiful, beautiful sight. In the sewer with their source, Steve and Tony must be taking them down before they manage to get out into the open.

The marksman allows himself a two-minute rest, muscles aching and skin shiny with sweat from the strain of drawing and releasing tough bowstrings for a long period of time. He watches as Sam arcs through the air with the grace of a bird and uses the knife-sharp point of his wing to slice the head off a stray wasp heading for a crowd of distant onlookers.

It’s then that Steve and Tony’s victorious yell booms through the comlink and with startling speed, the wasps all of a sudden go still. They drop to the ground like flies, the weight of their bodies cracking the concrete and crushing the roof and bonnet of the cars abandoned by the members of the public scrambling to get to safety.

_“Thank God for that,”_ Natasha breathes.

“Oh, finally.” Clint slings his quiver onto the ground and lets his back hit the ground. “Finally. Can we have Chinese for dinner? Watching one of the wasps crash into that Chinese takeaway over there made me _really_ crave it.”

_“I second that,”_ Sam says.

Thor’s laugh is guttural and booming. _“I, too, second that!”_

_“Don’t you mean ‘third that’?”_ comes Tony.

Sam touches down onto the rooftop. “Need a lift, birdbrain?” he asks good-naturedly.

With the adrenaline of a successful battle fresh in their veins, the team throw jokes back and forth over the comlink as they start to get themselves together in preparation for returning home. Stark’s post-battle cleanup team are just pulling up in their trucks and the police are appearing to erect barriers in the road so the public don’t enter into the danger zone. It’s something to behold - it’s the sight of _victory._

Only, just as Clint is picking up his quiver and bow again, Steve’s voice over the comlink is not light-hearted with relief but cold with his classic Captain America seriousness. _“Stark, what’s that? On that bit.”_

_“Huh?”_

_“There, look.”_

_“Oh. That’s… spicy. J, what is it?”_

Clint glances at Sam with a cocked brow. Off the comlink, he says, “wonder what they’re looking at.”

_“Errr… what the fuck,”_ comes Tony’s voice after a minute.

_“What is it, Stark?”_ Natasha prompts impatiently.

A hologram flashes at Clint from the Stark Watch on his wrist. It shows him an image, clearly taken directly from one of the Iron Man suit’s external cameras. It takes him a hot minute to figure out what he’s supposed to be looking at, but when he does, his heart drops from his chest into the coldest pit of his stomach like a bomb dropped from a plane.

“This is bad,” he says. “Real bad.”

.

They rally back to the Tower together and certainly don’t expect to see the police and a sorry crowd of Stark Industries employees among the curious members of the public collected around its base.

It’s Natasha who is the first to mention it, fingers resting on the gun on her hip. “This is unusual.”

Sam places Clint onto the ground before he, too, lands, wings sheathing back into their pack with a sharp _woosh._ “This is weird,” he mutters to the marksman as he pulls his goggles away from his eyes, exposing fresh concern. “Look up there.”

The windows leading into their communal living space twenty-four floors up are completely shattered, leaving a large, gaping hole in the side of the Tower. Shards of glass crunch under their thick-soled boots. It isn’t unusual for something or someone to break into the Tower for whatever reason they justify it with, but it hasn’t happened while they were otherwise occupied before. At this point, here could either be some serious repercussions or nothing at all.

“What’s going on?” Tony demands as soon as he touches down, flipping his faceplate up.

The unfortunate officer he’s interrogating nervously glances up the surface of the Tower. “A couple of the wasps- uh, some of the robots broke into the Tower, Mr. Stark, sir. We don’t know if there’s structural damage or- or if they had any intent, but-”

“J, scan the building. Give me the deets.”

The AI obliges. “There is damage to the windows of floor twenty-four. However, structural integrity remains at one-hundred percent. The building is perfectly safe to enter, Sir.”

“What broke in? What did they do?”

“My security camera feed shows two of the robotic wasps you had been fighting breaking in through the window. They then proceed to leave the communal living space and appear to head for the left-wing elevator. I can not tell you any more for that is when I was disabled by some sort of blocking signal that the wasps must have produced.”

“What? They disabled you?”

“Yes, sir. They disabled all functions I had in the Tower, including audio and visual recording. It is also the reason I failed to alert you sooner. I am sorry, sir.”

Tony rubs tiredly at his eyes. “Not your fault, J. Is Bruce okay?”

Almost as if on cue, the doctor in question frantically pushes past the barriers erected by the police to reach them. The doctor hadn’t been present for the battle simply by choice - when questioned, he’d said that he didn’t want to ‘create more damage than necessary’ by bringing out The Other Guy.

“Tony! Steve! Oh, thank God you’re okay,” he breathes, anxiously running his hands through his salt-and-pepper curls. “JARVIS was completely silent. I couldn’t get to them before they left again. I’m sorry.”

“We’re just glad you’re safe, Banner,” Steve tells him.

“They left again?” Tony echoes, angling for elaboration.

Bruce nods solemnly. “Yeah. I asked JARVIS to scan the entire Tower. They’re gone.”

That in itself is a cause for concern - the team understand that pretty quickly. The fact that they broke in and left again afterwards without killing anybody, which is what they naturally assumed was the primary function in their programming, gives off the implication that they did in fact have intent and didn’t just happen to stray away from the swarm. Not to mention that they disabled an extremely advanced artificial intelligence system to hide their activities.

Tony’s eyes are hard and sharp. “Out of the way,” he snaps at the officer he’d been drilling for answers previously, who practically skitters like a frightened sheep as he pushes past. “Out of the way. Out of my fucking way!”

.

It isn’t long before the evacuated Stark Industries employees are let back into the building and the police eventually disintegrate away from the scene of the crime upon request. The workers who are here to replace the glass in the window arrive quickly and get the job done within an hour. And, within another one, the shards on the ground are swept up and the damaged furniture is replaced and it’s as if nothing even happened in the first place.

If only that could be the end of it, though.

The Iron Man suit retracts itself off of Tony’s body just as he storms into his workshop, slamming the glass door against the wall so hard that it could have shattered. He barely makes it two steps in before he realises - it’s an absolute fucking mess. It’s usually a mess, but not like _this._

Draws are open and their contents are mostly on the floor. Papers are strewn everywhere the eye can see. The half-completed upgrade to one of his other suit’s gauntlets have been knocked off their stands. DUM-E and U, both shaken up from _whatever_ happened, flock to their creator the moment he enters.

Tony puts a reassuring hand onto DUM-E’s claw as it brushes against his shoulder. “I thought so,” he mutters, his voice a window into the growing sense of anxiety curling in his stomach. “I thought they’d go into here. JARVIS being disabled meant they could open the door as they please. Fuck. Fuck!”

“Is everything- oh. Holy shit.”

The billionaire watches Clint in the corner of his peripheral vision as he takes in what he’s seeing. “They went through everything,” he tells him sullenly. “I thought those two were just a couple of strays from the swarm, but I guess I was wrong.”

“Is anything missing?”

“JARVIS, you heard the man.”

“Comparing previous data of the room’s contents to current data,” the AI commentates helpfully. “Results show that only one item is missing from the room, Sir.”

“And what is that?”

“It is the blueprints to your updated version of the arc reactor technology, Sir.”

Tony Stark isn’t one to project his emotions very much, but even he can’t help the curse that slips out of his throat. Ice cold fear curdles in the pit of his stomach. “That’s… that’s powerful and valuable technology,” he says to Clint, who just sucks in a deep, sharp breath. “Oh, what the Hell. What the Hell is happening?”

“Surely you have copies,” the sharpshooter points out.

“Of course I have copies of it. Hell, I could do it from memory. That isn’t the problem here, though - the problem is that someone else has the power to use it. They could make one of these if they wanted to,” he raps at the disk glowing a pleasant blue through his shirt, “or they could use the plans to make something else. Anything else.”

Clint scratches at his stubble. “Shit.”

“You said you know what that thing on the queen bee was, right?”

“Wasp.”

_“Barton.”_

The marksman wearily scratches his eyebrow. “Yeah. I know what it is. It… it isn’t good news, Tony.”

“Get the team here. Now. We need to get to the bottom of this.”

Clint is notorious for being a little shit, but he also knows when it isn’t the time to crack jokes. He’s leaving the workshop and sprinting up the stairs three steps at a time before Tony even has time to blink.

This… isn’t good. This isn’t good at _all._ There is a reason he kept the plans to the arc reactor technology under wraps - it’s extremely fucking dangerous in the wrong hands. A self-charging, powerful energy source created from a completely independent element like that has close to _infinite_ possibilities.

It makes sense to him now. The swarm was purely a distraction; the entire point of the invasion was to keep them away from the Tower so they could get in there themselves. Their ability to disable JARVIS’ functions in the building like that is only proof that adds fuel onto the fire. 

Not only that, but they were quick enough to get in and out without catching the attention of the Hulk. They knew what they were after and they knew where it was. Something about that little detail gives Tony the idea that they had a traitor on the inside - either someone who did it all themselves or someone who helped someone else do it instead.

“Tones,” Bruce’s voice says out of nowhere and it’s enough to pull the billionaire out of his thought process. “Tones, Clint is ready to tell us what’s going on. Are you okay?”

He hadn’t even noticed them come in, he’d been so deep in thought. The team all watch him carefully from where they’ve all perched in a cluster in the workshop. “Yeah,” he says, offering the doctor the strongest smile he can manage considering the given situation. “Yeah, I’m good. Cough it up, Clint. We’re waiting.”

The marksman swallows and rubs a hand over the back of his head. “Well, uh, I first became aware of this group back when I worked as a full-time SHIELD agent...”

.

It isn’t often that Nick Fury openly expresses sympathy for _any_ form of life and so Clint can’t help but be intrigued when he overhears the man saying, “they did that to fuckin’ children? What the fuck?” into his earpiece while on his way to grab a bite to each for lunch one sleepy afternoon in SHIELD headquarters.

He hovers uselessly for another five minutes until Fury says goodbye and drops the earpiece onto the closest countertop. “Is everything okay, sir?” he probes, hoping to God and everything else Holy that he wouldn’t go immediately rejected.

God listened, apparently, because Fury looks Clint right in the eyes and says, “I can trust you, right, Agent?”

“You know you can.”

He maintains eye contact until Fury speaks again. “I thought HYDRA were the only people sick enough to create super soldiers out of innocent people but today I found out that I was very much incorrect. Ever heard of the Yellowjackets?”

“Isn’t… isn’t that a species of wasp?”

“Correct, but they’re also an underground crime ring based in Moldova. Not a SHIELD problem until an informant on the inside just told me that they’re getting into the business of creating supersoldiers.”

“Out of children.”

“Out of children,” Fury echoes solemnly.

The marksman starts to feel sick to his stomach. It’s one thing making super soldiers out of the innocent, but it’s another to make super soldiers out of innocent fucking _children._ It makes him want to unload the contents of his stomach onto the floor just thinking about what kind of horrors those kids could be going through right at this moment.

“What are we going to do about it?” Clint asks, angling to make the conversation somewhat progressive.

“We have the location of their facilities,” Fury tells him. “It’s in Moldova. You coming?”

“To do what?”

The director turns to stare him directly in the eyes.

“We’re going to clean that shitstain off this fuckin’ Earth.”

.

“But when we went over there, there was… nothing. They’d left nothing that could clue us to their whereabouts. In fact, the only thing they left there was,” Clint swallows, looking a little grey in the face, “operation tables. Uh, covered in blood. And that logo you saw on the queen wasp was, uh, on- on the walls.”

The atmosphere in the room is suddenly very dim. Everybody is shocked into silence, the very thought of the suffering those kids must be going through rendering them completely and utterly speechless.

“Oh my God,” Steve whispers.

Sam looks, to say the least, sick to the stomach. “Any idea where they went?”

“No,” Clint replies emotionlessly. The resurfacing of the issue must have seriously shaken him because it isn’t like Clint at all to say _anything_ void of emotion. “SHIELD have been looking ever since, but they have no leads. They don’t even know if they stayed in Moldova or if they fled the country.”

“I was hoping they’d be gone for good,” Natasha mutters, wearily massaging at her temples. “I was hoping that they wouldn’t show up again. But I guess I hoped for too much.”

Pangs of nausea overwhelm Tony as he starts to connect the dots. “They’re going to implement my arc reactor technology into their… sick fucking practises,” he murmurs, subconsciously running a hand over the glowing disk and it’s metal casing buried six inches his sternum. “They’re going to put it into kids.”

Maybe, hopefully, he’s wrong. Maybe they’re planning on using it to make the supersoliders armour and weapons and they wanted to use the arc reactor technology to create it. A powerful, self-charging energy source is _perfect_ for that kind of thing, after all. The thought of traumatised children with arc reactor-powered weapons in their arsenal is unsettling in itself but it’s a better alternative to anything _else_ the technology could be used for.

“What about SHIELD’s informant on the inside?” Bruce pipes up. He looks concerningly green at the hem of his shirt collar. “Didn’t Fury mention that he got the information from someone on the inside?”

“They found his body at the scene,” Natasha supplies coldly, “with the word ‘TRAITOR’ carved into his forehead with a knife, a slit in his throat so deep it was close to decapitation and seventeen gunshot wounds to the chest, head and stomach.”

There are some sick, sick people on this planet, Tony concludes in that moment. People sick enough to use innocent children to make their pointless dreams of world domination a reality. People sick enough to put them through all kinds of Hell to behave as expendable pawns in their oh-so-grand scheme.

“Everybody rest up,” he orders decidedly. “We have no choice. We’re not letting this go on any longer than it has to.”

“Now wait just one second,” Steve interjects, and Tony wonders why anybody on this fucking planet would question that order in particular. “Don’t you think this is a little rash? Someone steals some papers from your workshop and suddenly you want to throw yourself into it? Shouldn’t SHIELD be the one who-”

“Rogers, if you think I’m going to stand by knowing that there are kids suffering at the hands of these people just because you think it’s a little _rash,_ you have _severely_ misjudged my direction of morality. Now go and rest up, soldier. You’ll need it.”

“Yeah, b-”

This time it’s Sam on his feet. That’s how Tony knows he really does feel shaken by this whole thing - he’s definitely not a confrontational person. Not at all. “We have the power to put a stop to this whole thing and you’re fucking _questioning_ it?” he demands, voice absolutely chilling. “I respect you, Captain, I really do. But on this, you’re either in or you’re out. We’re taking those fuckers down with or without you.”

The man swallows. “Fine. You’re right,” he murmurs. “Let’s get rested. Tony, you too. Come on.”

The team gradually dissipate, leaving only Clint and Tony left in the workshop. They both stare absently into the mess strewn all over the room. “I don’t think I could ever forget seeing all that blood and knowing it belonged to a- a child,” the marksman says into the silence.

“I know, Barton. I know.” He claps a hand onto the blond man’s shoulder. The man is shaking bodily and it brings Tony to realise how much this whole Yellowjacket business has really left a mark on him. Rightfully so - the entire _concept_ of it is haunting. “Don’t worry. We’re going to put a stop to it.”

“What if we can’t?”

Tony swallows. He doesn’t want to think about that. “Need I remind you that not only do we have billion dollar facilities and technology at our fingertips, but we also have a team of people who are nearly as smart as I am?”

It’s supposed to lighten the mood, but Clint doesn’t laugh. “They’re really dangerous, Tony,” he says seriously.

“And so are we. Now go and get some rest. God knows you need it.”

“So do you, Stark. C’mon.”

“I’ve got a workshop to clean up.”

The marksman regards him for a moment before he stoops down to collect some of the papers thrown carelessly onto the floor at his feet. “So do I.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> comments would be raaaad
> 
> MY DISCORD SERVER:  
> https://discord.gg/SgGFvDC
> 
> MY TUMBLR:  
> https://spicyjarvis.tumblr.com/


	3. CHAPTER TWO

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if the small bit of romanian in this chapter is incorrect, feel free to help me fix it - i used google translate. lmao

When Peter Parker was ten years old, his Uncle Ben accidentally ran over a duck in the road.

He remembers it as if it happened yesterday. They’d been driving in the countryside on their way back into their rural holiday motels, on one of those thin, winding lanes without any yellow markings. When you’re accustomed to the wide, well-kept roads of the city, the obscene volume of potholes, blind bends and narrow one-way routes in the countryside are just a little more than nerve-wracking.

The duck had emerged from the hedgerow on the driver’s side, presumably to head to the pond across the road, except it never got there because it was underneath Ben’s wheel before he’d even clocked it. Peter can recall the uncomfortable bump of the car and how his uncle had muttered, “stupid bird!” under his breath.

Ten-year-old Peter had glanced in the side mirror to check if they really had driven over it, and upon seeing the motionless clump of feathers in the middle of the road, he’d cried out “stop!” and insisted they check if it’s actually dead. It would be cruel to leave it there to die slowly if there was a chance that they could save it.

“It’s probably dead, Pete,” his uncle had told him. “I’m sorry.”

But Peter could be a stubborn bastard of a child when he wanted to be and eventually his uncle decided it was best just to humour him after a couple minutes of hysterical shouting. He stopped the car at the entrance of someone’s driveway and they walked back up the road towards the bird lying on the concrete.

It wasn’t dead. It looked dead, at first, but it wasn’t. In fact, the moment Peter tentatively poked its body with a stick (“touching wild animals directly can give you diseases if you’re not careful, Petey,” his uncle had told him once upon a time), it started to flap and skitter across the road in a desperate attempt to flee despite the fact that most of its lower body was mangled by the wheel of the car.

It was painful to watch. 

It had hurt Peter’s ten-year-old heart.

And it’s what Peter thinks about, ten years later, as he watches one of his closest friends - his name is Finn, but the staff know him as Nine - shake and scream on the ground with a taser pressing against the dip of his pelvis, weakly trying to crawl away from the three guards who laugh obnoxiously at him from the threshold of their cell.

“They call _this_ a soldier?” one of them jests. “Come on, get up! Fight!”

“Three years of training and you can’t even fight a taser,” another one cackles. “Useless.”

“Pieces of shit,” the third one spits. “Especially _you,_ insect.”

It takes a moment for Peter to register that he is referring to him because all he can think about is that stupid fucking duck, flailing helplessly on the concrete of that little countryside road. He wants to retaliate, wants to see their heads flying off their shoulders and rolling across the cold cell floor, but he knows that’s only ever going to be a dream and never a reality.

The first one, the one with the tazer, retracts it away from his friend’s skin. “Get up, Nine,” he demands, his grin cruel and witch-like.

Finn spits blood onto the concrete. He can’t get up - Peter knows he can’t. The way his arms shake and the colour drains from his skin and a thick, shiny layer of sweat forms on his forehead clues him into just how exhausted he is. His breath comes out in weary pants and, when he looks hopelessly up at Peter from the ground, his eyes communicate a thousand calls for help he knows he can’t get.

“He can’t get up,” one of them points out, giggling.

“Shame.” The first one flicks the taser on and off, regarding the way both Finn and Peter flinch away from them instinctively. “They’re like frightened animals. How pathetic.”

“Circus animals in a cage,” the third one cooes.

It’s all so condescending and sickening and Peter can think of one hundred different ways he could kill all three of them just with the objects presented to him in the room, but he knows better than that. The last time he tried to resist, he ended up losing so much blood that he probably would have been dead if it weren’t for his accelerated regeneration. Instead, he just settles for fixing the bastard holding the taser with a challenging glare, just _daring_ him to try it again.

The guard catches his eye. “Ooh, if looks could kill.”

“Wouldn’t touch him,” another warns, “he’s the Boss’ favourite.”

“Boo-fucking-hoo.”

The third one shakes his head. “He’s going to be fired.”

“Killed,” the second one corrects. “If he’s lucky.”

“I’ll be fine.” Carelessly, the first one steps over the quivering clump that is poor Finn’s body on the ground and pins Peter against the wall, trapping his neck against the brick with a large, gloved hand. “D’you want some, Seven? Do you?”

Peter says nothing. Just as he’s been trained.

“Not gonna say anythin’, huh?”

Nothing.

He knows it’s going to happen before it does, so he barely flinches when the guard activates the taser and swiftly digs it between his ribs. White hot heat shocks his system within seconds; like his organs were drenched in gasoline and set alight with a lightning bolt. For but a moment his vision swims and he doesn’t realise he’s on the ground until the guard finally retracts the taser.

Peter tries to get up but the guard holds him down with the thick-soled leather boot on his stomach. Chest heaving, heart hammering against his sternum, muscles spasming and cramping, he glares up at the guard who leans over him with a dark Cheshire Cat smile. “How’d you like that?” he spits, sounding far too proud of himself.

“Enough,” a low, dangerous voice orders then, and Peter can see all three guards immediately begin to stir and move away from the threshold. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Making sure they know who’s boss,” one of the guards supplies wickedly.

“By _tasering_ them in their cells? You think you’re tough because you tasered two boys who were trained to not fight back against you and I, in the only place they get any peace and quiet around here? Have some dignity.”

There’s no response to that one. Figures.

The guard on top of him removes his boot and Peter can finally exhale. After taking a moment to catch his breath he moves to help prop Finn up against the wall. The boy took a lot more electricity then he did this time around and he’s clearly still recovering from the shock.

Finn is a bright young man of seventeen with grey eyes and a smile that beams gold, even after the three long, long years he’s spent in the facility. There’s some kind of endearing clinginess about him that clues Peter into the fact that he values the company of others over being by himself. Not that he minds at all - after two years of living in awful isolation, his arrival had been a welcome change.

“Are you okay?” Finn whispers to him.

“Are _you_ okay?”

The boy nods, but it’s hesitant and Peter knows better than to believe it. “Yeah,” he murmurs. “Yeah, I’m okay.”

After a couple of minutes, the guards are eventually ordered to disperse with their tails between their legs. With them gone, Peter can finally see who it was who saved the pair of them - and it’s exactly who he expects it to be.

The head guard, Kinley, has always been more humane than anyone else in this God-forsaken facility. She is in no way a knight in shining armour - she’s put Peter and Finn through just as much pain as everyone else has here, if not more - but she at least understands that they need a break sometimes and that their cells are probably the safest space they get around here. She’s mean, yeah, but she isn’t _cruel._

Peter can appreciate that.

“You two good?” she asks them. There’s no concern, no sympathy, but there isn’t that bitter harshness that Peter has been plunged into for five years of his life either. “Sorry about them. One with the taser is getting the swift chop, if ya know what I mean.” She playfully wriggles her eyebrows at them.

The younger boy subconsciously shuffles closer to Peter, who understands that as a cue to do the speaking for them and says, “yeah, we’ll be okay. Thank you.”

“Even our soldiers deserve a little time away,” Kinley says to them sagely, before making her departure in a swift flurry of flowing brunette curls and flawless skin the colour of salted caramel. The cell door closes behind her and the cold clunk of it locking echoes off the walls.

Peter helps Finn to his feet before he moves to sit down on his bed - if he can even call it that. It’s a hard slab of steel covered with a mattress just about as thin as a floor rug, with a single, lumpy pillow and a thin, stained sheet for a duvet. It’s taken a toll on his joints and his back over time and he feels like he’s a twenty-year-old living in the body of someone who’s eighty years older.

“She’s always been nicer to us than the rest,” Finn says absently as he, too, sits on his bed, twiddling his thumbs restlessly in his lap.

“It’s not that she’s nicer,” Peter murmurs, “it’s that she gives us a break.”

“It’s so dumb that giving someone a break from… that giving someone a _break_ is _nice_ now. That should just be… an expectation.”

“In an ideal world.”

The boy sighs wistfully. “Oh, if only.”

Peter shifts so he’s lying on his back, staring up at the ceiling. “If only.”

They remain mutually silent for a couple of long, sad minutes after that, until Finn breaks it with the one question that Peter just wishes he had a different answer to every time he asks it: “do you think anyone is ever going to come for us, Pete?”

A year or two ago, when Finn first showed up all bright-eyed and geared to fight, Peter did his best to upkeep the boy’s hopes for rescue. There is absolutely nothing wrong with feeling _hope_ in even the most hopeless of situations. It sparks the fire that ignites into patience and determination and courage and Peter didn’t want to be the one to take that away from the boy.

But it’s been three years for Finn and five years for Peter and he’s _tired._ He’s _tired_ of trying to stay strong in such a shitty, shitty situation. He’s _tired_ of doing his best. He’s _tired_ of waiting around for some knight in shining fucking armour to come and pull him out of this Hellhole because he knows it’ll never happen.

He’s _tired_ of hoping.

So, with every last lick of fire inside of him smothered to embers, he has no choice but to tell Finn _no._

.

They find themselves in Moldova. It’s difficult to start investigations when there’s not really any leads, so Clint and Natasha take a small collection of the team - only Tony, Sam and Steve decided to come along after much debate between everybody - to the only place that could give them any kind of clue - the old facility that SHIELD had stormed previously only to find it completely and utterly abandoned.

The building they’re looking for is buried within a collection of structures that look pretty much identical; all run-down, close to collapse and eerily empty of any kind of life. Not a single plant reaches through the cracks in the ground; no strange Europian insect scurries across the concrete. The atmosphere in the air feels thick and unpleasant. It is completely devoid and that in itself, to Tony, is very chilling. Something about this place just feels very, very wrong. He clutches the handle of his Suit Briefcase anxiously.

Despite the dominance of the similarities between the buildings, Clint and Natasha know exactly which one they’re looking for. They lead the team to its door; vast, rusting and shuddering in the breeze. It’s shut with a complicated biometric lock that Tony close to immediately realises belongs to SHIELD.

Steve looks pale. “This is…”

“Extremely frightening?” Sam finishes for him. “I agree. Let’s bounce.”

“No,” Tony states seriously. “There’s too much riding on this.”

“As terrifying as this whole place looks,” Clint says loudly, “Tony is unfortunately correct. We’re going to have to go in if we want answers. Sorry.”

Natasha finally decides to pipe up, then. “Besides, it’s empty. There’s no one here and there hasn’t been since SHIELD locked it all up. Look - the number on the screen here says how many times it’s been used since the lock was deployed.”

“Zero,” Sam reads. “Phew.”

In the orange lenses of Tony’s sunglasses, JARVIS pulls up a display of the heat signatures within the building. There are no red spots within the map of blues and greens save for many little bodies scattered around the corners. “No humanoid heat signatures located. However, there are two-hundred and thirty-nine living rats,” the AI informs him unhelpfully.

“There are two-hundred and thirty-nine rats,” Tony echoes comically.

The marksman casts Tony an amused grin. “That’s very unhelpful.”

“Can we get on with this?” Steve says impatiently, drumming his fingers on his shield.

Nobody came to Moldova wearing their suits, but everybody has weapons on them; Steve has his shield, Sam has his wings packed into their case on his back, Clint has his bow and a good amount of arrows and Tony has his Suit Briefcase. No one knows what Natasha has on her, but knowing her, she’s most likely armed to the teeth with knives, tasers and guns. Tony can only recognise one of her taser rings slipped onto her right hand’s middle finger.

Clint puts his hand over the biometric lock. It takes a moment to scan it before the screen goes a brilliant shade of green and states _AGENT CLINT BARTON - ACCESS AUTHORISED_ in bold black text. It’s then that the biometric scanner’s mechanism clicks loudly at them and the screen informs them that the lock is indeed open. “Let’s do this,” he says uneasily.

With the help of Steve’s enhanced strength, Clint and Natasha manage to pull open the vast metal sheet that is the door of the building. The thick, putrid smell of dried blood, rotting rat shit and years upon years of strict neglection wafts back into their faces and Tony begins to feel queasy. “That,” he begins, “is not pleasant.”

“Ergh, it’s worse than it was before,” Natasha grimaces.

Sam coughs into his sleeve. “Is it too late to go home?”

No matter how much they would like to, they all know that they can’t. Tony doesn’t think he would be able to sleep at night (not that he does in the first place) if he tried to forget about the whole point of this investigation. He may be a bit of a dickhead at times - he can stoop low as to admit that - but the thought of letting this organisation get away with child exploitation and kidnapping makes him feel sick to his stomach.

The first thing the team see is an empty lobby and two doors; one is signposted as ‘Staff Cafeteria’ and the other has text that, over the years, seems to have been worn down to the point of being unreadable save for the vague, rather unhelpful syllable ‘-tion’. There’s a thick layer of dust across every surface and an old trashcan has been tipped onto the ground, leaving foreign food wrappers and a couple faded coffee cups labelled ‘Tucano Coffee’ scattered.

Spray-painted in yellow onto the wall is a bitterly familiar logo - the one Tony has discovered on the body of the Queen Wasp back in the New York sewer line. Though it’s faded over time, it’s still prominent against the corrugated grey wall of the building.

“What doesn’t make sense to me,” Sam begins to say as he picks his way towards the cafeteria door, “is why a group that, uh, creates child superhumans would release an army of robot wasps into New York. It’s the kind of business that you want to keep under wraps as much as possible, right?”

“We went over this,” Steve murmurs.

“To distract us,” Tony supplies solemnly, “for long enough to take the plans to my arc reactor technology.”

“Oh.”

The captain shudders. “This whole place feels sickening.”

Clint kicks at the toppled trashcan only to have disturbed a large family of rats who had apparently been residing inside of it, for seven of them scurry out of the pile of rubbish on the ground and into the closest dark corners. “Oh, fuck,” he breathes, startled. “Rats, man.”

There definitely isn’t much they’re going to find in the lobby or the cafeteria, so Natasha takes them through the door ominously labelled ‘-tion’. The corridor it leads to is particularly dark and the stench of blood is close to unbearable - so much so, in fact, that Tony considers putting the suit in his briefcase on just to regulate and clean the air that goes into his lungs.

With their handy pocket torches switched on, Clint and Natasha lead the way down the corridor. The powerful beams of LED light shows a stained tile floor and matching stone brick walls stained with unexplainable patches of black and red and yellow. The team walk past many doors; some with their centre window spray painted over and others taped up with cardboard and labelled ‘KEEP OUT’ or ‘DO NOT ENTER’. Tony shudders. It’s like something out of a horror movie. 

“Why do all evil organisations have such creepy lairs?” Sam mutters from the back of the group. “It wouldn’t hurt to make it look nice, you know. Paint the walls a nice blue. Add a couple of framed photographs. Maybe a lamp?”

“You know, I don’t think aesthetics were their priority,” Steve points out.

“At _least_ a can of Febreeze.”

“I second that,” Clint says, ahead of them. 

With a signal from Natasha, the marksman pauses at one of the doors; it’s the only one without anything covering the windows. “This is the room where we came across the body of SHIELD’s inside man. It’s, uh, not pleasant here. There’s quite a bit of dried blood. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

The sharpshooter really wasn’t lying, Tony concludes as soon as he steps over the threshold. Not only is there a large puddle of blood dried onto the floor tiles, but there’s a whole lot of it pooled across and underneath the ominously placed operation table in the centre of the room. There are thick leather straps bolted onto the table, though they look as if they’d been violently snapped. A selection of incision tools lay scattered across a rolling table and the ground.

Against the walls are shelves of what looks like bottles of prescription pills, but the labels have been scratched away and they’re all entirely empty. “We checked those for residue back then, hoping it would give us an idea of what was in them,” Natasha says as soon as she clocks Tony looking.

“Let me guess: there was nothing?” he says.

“Nothing.”

“What about fingerprints left on the tools?”

The agent, as she runs a hand through her reddish-brown locks, shakes her head. “We’ve checked every inch of this place,” she tells the billionaire solemnly. “These Yellowjacket bastards are good at clearing up their tracks."

Steve has found his way to the back of the room to where one of those blue hospital curtains shields the rest of the space. He draws it back to reveal yet another operation table. This one is clean of dried blood stains but in the place of leather straps are dizzyingly thick metal ones. “Christ,” the superhuman breathes. “Even I’d have trouble breaking through _those.”_

“Yeah,” Clint says. “There’s some real weird shit in this place.”

“For real,” Sam mutters.

On the left of a back wall is yet another door, Tony notices. It’s made of thick, rusting metal much like the one they walked through with the window spray-painted over with white and labelled _DO NOT ENTER_ in scuffed red marker pen. He steps tenderly over the stains of blood on the floor towards it. “Steve, look. A door.”

The blond tilts his head to the left like a confused puppy. “What’s behind that?”

“Storage room,” Natasha supplies. “We checked it all over. There’s nothing useful in there.”

Sam rubs tiredly at his eyebrow. “Gotta say, guys” he begins, “this lead isn’t looking too good. I don’t think we’re going to find anything that SHIELD didn’t. You sure it’s worth wasting our time and energy on this shithole anymore?”

“There’s another room it might be worth checking out,” Clint tries hopefully, motioning towards the door.

Choosing to not add to the conversation, Tony steps towards the door and gingerly pushes it open. The beam of his LED torch is powerful enough to cover a large amount of the room without having to move it. It’s definitely a storage room devoid of anything useful as Natasha told him; the shelves are empty and everything that _wasn’t_ removed - such as syringes and medical masks - are still in their packets with their labels scratched away.

“It’s useless,” he mutters to Steve, who leans over to peer curiously over his shoulder.

It’s then that JARVIS all of a sudden pulls up a display of the room in the lenses of his sunglasses, only with a large flashing red patch across a patch of the ground. “Sir, I have detected unsound structural integrity in the highlighted section of the room,” his monotonous British accent informs him helpfully.

“Unsound structural integrity?” Tony echoes. “We’re on the ground floor, JARVIS. There can’t be anything... _unsound_ about the ground.”

“There appears to be a room underneath the one you are standing in, Sir.”

“A room?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Just underneath this one? None others?”

“That is correct, Sir.” The image in front of his eyes now changes to a blueprint showing the underground space beneath the room. Indeed, the AI appears to be speaking the truth - there’s a basement underneath this supply room with its exact dimensions. “I can not detect any underground rooms other than the one underneath this room.”

“Hold on.” Tony edges back past Steve, who regards his movements carefully, and catches Clint’s attention. “Legolas, JARVIS just told me that there’s a room underneath this place. Did you already know that? Is it worth checking out or is it a bust?”

The archer pauses. “What?”

“Did you say there’s basement space here?” Natasha probes.

“JARVIS says there is. So, err, yeah. Is that new information…?”

With little hesitation, Clint pushes past him and Steve to wriggle his way into the storage room. “Where is it? How did he say we could get into it?”

“Be careful, Barton, the gr-”

Before the billionaire can barely even try to finish his sentence, the deafening roar of snapping wooden planks and smashing tiles interrupts him and Clint releases a frightened shout. Tony reaches the door just in time to see the floor caving in underneath his feet and he watches helplessly as the marksman disappears underground.

“Shit,” Natasha curses, stepping hurriedly past Tony and Steve. “Barton, are you okay? Are you hurt?”

It would be lying to say that Tony wasn’t nervous about this. He’s aware that Clint is most likely perfectly fine - he didn’t even fall that far if the dimensions of the room is anything to judge by - but who knows what could be down there? SHIELD clearly didn’t come across it in their initial investigation of the place. It could be anything from another supplies cupboard to a fucking body pit.

“Clint?” Steve tries.

“Oh, man,” Sam mutters, sounding ill, “he’s fuckin’ dead.”

A couple of moments pass before Tony hears a strained grunt and a disgruntled voice call out, “I’m not fucking dead! I’m fine!”

Natasha leans over to peer into the hole and, to everybody’s surprise, actually starts to _laugh._ Laugh like she’s watching the most hilarious stand-up comedy routine in the world. And when Sam steps towards her to see just what’s so funny, he breaks out in hysterics, too.

“Trash,” he snickers. “It’s a dump. It’s just piles of trash.”

Eventually, Tony gets confirmation from JARVIS that what’s left of the ground is stable enough to walk on and looks down into the hole to see Clint lying on the very peak of the trash heap, laughing just as hard as everybody else is. “I can’t believe we thought we found a lead,” the archer breathes around his giddy smile, “but it’s just a trash chute.”

“Unbelievable,” Steve mutters, but he’s grinning, too.

Sam shakes his head down at him. “It’s where he belongs.”

Though it’s disappointing that it doesn’t lead to anything useful, Tony can admit that seeing Clint lying on a pile of trash _is_ pretty fucking funny in the moment. “Come on, Katniss, let’s get you out of there.”

“Pretty comfy down here,” Clint jokes. He just about manages to clamber to his hands and knees but it’s then that the battered car door underneath him slips and he falls back onto his stomach. “Ow. Oh, shit. This has bullet holes in.”

He sits back on his feet so as to remove his weight off the car door and flips it over. The white paint is scratched in places and there isn’t a window or a handle on it anymore but printed onto the door in large maroon block text is _compania ta de măcelărie de încredere_ underneath what looks to be an image of a cartoon cow, smiling. “Your reliable butcher company,” the marksman translates. “That’s Romanian. It’s a common language in Moldova.” He then takes a moment to peer at a section of particularly faded text above the logo. “Marco’s.”

“Classic butcher name,” Sam jokes to Steve, who looks unamused.

“Why is there a butcher van’s door in here,” Clint mutters, looking up at the faces who peer down at him curiously, “and why is it riddled with bullet holes?”

There are a million different explanations for why it’s in the trash chute of an evil underground organisation, really. It could just be general trash. It could be part of a van that they obtained by shooting through the door to kill the driver, before ripping it off to rid the vehicle of any suspicious evidence.

But, to Tony, out of all of these options, there’s one thing is most definitely is - it’s a _lead._

.

Peter cannot say he’s surprised when he’s ripped out of his bed at three in the morning by Kinley and a couple other guards he doesn’t recognise. It’s actually a common occurrence because nothing around here is particularly scheduled - they just do things and take you places when they want to, without so much as a polite warning beforehand.

Not only that, but he doesn’t know what to expect, either. He could be going anywhere right now. He could be doing anything. It’s probably because he’s still trying to wake up and make sense of what’s going on, but he doesn’t feel scared yet. He should, and he’s aware of that, but he doesn’t.

It’s as he’s shoved roughly onto the cold, cruel surface of an operating table that the terror finally begins to set in. With its cold talons, it trickles through every limb and every organ in his body before it seizes his heart and puts a boulder in the very pit of his stomach. It feels as if there’s something stuck in his throat and he can’t choke it out again.

He used to get leather cuffs, but the staff quickly learned that he can snap them off with little effort whatsoever. The thick metal ones that replace them aren’t so easy to break through and they’re a thousand times more uncomfortable, allowing no wiggle room and squeezing his wrists just enough to make them ache for hours afterwards.

“We’ve got something new for you today, Spider,” a voice he doesn’t recognise, muffled by a medical mask, says to him from somewhere out of his field of vision. “And oh _boy_ is it just absolutely what you need. You’re a wonderful specimen, but this will give you so much power that you’ll thank us, Spider. I bet you’re excited.”

_Thrilled,_ Peter thinks to himself. He says nothing.

“Blindfold him, Kinley.”

The woman steps forward to do so with a black cloth in hand. He obediently shifts to let her put it around the back of his head. Just moments before his vision is snatched away from him, Peter thinks he catches Kinley mouthing to him, ‘I’m sorry.’

Oh.

Without his vision, it’s much harder to identify where everybody in the room is standing. He allows himself to focus solely on the change of air temperature and pressure in the room to get a better idea of what’s going on. There are three people stood at the foot of the operation table - that’s Kinley and the two guards who often accompany her for sure - and two people move around behind his head.

“The last soldier we tried this on lost too much blood and ended up dying before we could even install the metal casing,” the voice says. “I wasn’t sure what to do about that. That is until I remembered that you, my favourite out of all of our specimens, had obtained the most wonderful set of skills before you had even come to us! Who better to test this new technology out on than a boy with incredible regenerative abilities such as you?”

Oh.

_Oh._

Peter doesn’t know what’s going on, but he can already tell he is going to come out the other side of it really, seriously fucked up.

“Let’s hope he doesn’t have the same fate as the others, aye?” somebody else remarks.

“Aye. He’ll be fine,” the first voice hums. “Right, let’s get to work. Let’s get that shirt off him.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry :,)  
> comments are hella encouraging and 100% appreciated . <3
> 
> MY DISCORD SERVER:  
> https://discord.gg/SgGFvDC
> 
> MY TUMBLR:  
> https://spicyjarvis.tumblr.com/


	4. CHAPTER THREE

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> zoom zoom!!!! your supportive comments enabled me to push out a chapter at super speed!!!!

Everything is…

Dark.

If previous experience is anything to judge by, darkness is generally accompanied by silence.

Except it isn’t silent, not at all, because when he focuses, he can definitely hear the familiar heavy, panicked panting of his cellmate not too far away from him. Not only that but also the weak thud of his own heart behind his sternum. And, when he _really_ zeroes in on the uncomfortable tingling sensation in his limbs, he thinks he can hear the sound of his own blood running through his veins.

“Peter?”

His mouth is dry and his throat feels rough like sandpaper whenever he swallows. There’s still that metallic taste of blood in his cheeks, bitterly familiar to his taste buds after the countless blows to his face received in training. When he gathers enough awareness to attempt to blink his eyes open, the darkness doesn’t vanish.

Huh. That isn’t right.

“Peter? Are you awake?”

“Mmm,” he hums. “Wh… why’s it so _dark_ …?”

“Oh. Hold on.” A clammy hand appears on the side of his head and he’s not ashamed to admit that it made his heart skip a beat. It’s as it’s being untied that Peter realises he’s wearing a blindfold and that he hasn’t _actually_ gone blind as he feared in the back of his mind. “Is that better?”

A head-splitting blob of white light meets his eyes and he instinctively shields them with his hands. “Ow,” he mutters. “Yeah. Thanks.”

It takes a couple of minutes, but eventually, his vision adjusts to the change of light in the room and he can finally make sense of his surroundings. He’s lying in his cell, on the slab of metal he’s forced to call a bed. There’s a distinctive chill in the air that sends goosebumps running up his back like a sharp gust of winter wind. Crouching on the ground next to him is Finn, hovering over him anxiously, brows pinched together with concern.

“Hi,” he says.

“Hi,” Finn replies.

“Are you okay?”

Finn swallows. “I don’t think that’s a question you should be asking _me_ right now.”

Exhaling loudly, Peter levers himself upright onto his elbows. His entire body, especially his chest, aches as he tries to shift but he pushes through it with grinding teeth. “What d’you mean?” he mutters.

“I saw you get rushed out of bed three days ago.”

“Oh.”

He doesn’t remember too much from the last couple of days. Little flashes, fleeting images, sure, but nothing significant or coherent. Whenever he tries to recall specific details based on what he’s given, his head starts to throb a whole lot harder.

“You only came back an hour ago. They came and put you on the bed and left again.”

“Where was I?”

The boy scratches his head - something he does when he’s nervous, Peter has noticed over the years. “Kinley told me you were recovering from a… surgery when she did her rounds on the second day. She said you were so close to, um, dying, that they had to keep you under watch before they could bring you back.”

Peter stares at him. “Surgery?”

“Um.”

“Um?”

He nods towards Peter’s chest. “Look.”

Peter obliges but regrets it as soon as he does so. Smack bang in the middle of his chest, right where his bones seem to ache the most, is a thick, circular metal case that digs six inches into his body. There are wires of red, green, blue and yellow that seem to grow out of the bottom of it like fresh saplings in the soil, the rounded ports at the end of them connected to nothing.

Oh.

“They said they’re going to finish it once you’ve eaten,” Finn murmurs, and motions to the tray of unappealing grey mush sitting on his bedside table. “Kind of nice of them to give you a snack break, I think.”

“What the fuck,” Peter breathes. “What the fuck. What- what is that? What’s this for?”

“Woah, Pete,” Finn tries. “Relax. Please.”

“Relax?” he blabbers, suddenly hyper-aware of his depleting oxygen supply. “Don’t tell me to relax! You think I can fucking _relax_ when there’s a- a hole in my chest?”

The younger boy’s previously nervous, subdued demeanour seems to flip within seconds, for he’s suddenly on his feet and grasping Peter’s hands tightly within his own. “Hey, hey, listen to me, Pete,” he says, his voice demanding attention. “You are not about to have a panic attack about this. Hey. Hey, look at me.”

And he does. Finn’s grey eyes stare right into his own and it’s grounding. In that very moment, that eye contact becomes his anchor, and Peter latches onto that as if his life depends on it.

“There we go. There we go!”

Peter untangles his fingers from his cellmate’s and sits back against the wall, the cold bricks cooling the jarring twinge in his spine. “Thanks, Finn,” he mumbles, running a shaky hand through his tousled, tawny locks. “Thank you.”

“You would have done it for me, too,” Finn says simply.

Despite the circumstances at hand, Peter finds it in himself to offer the younger boy the biggest smile he can manage. There’s a huge, gaping hole in his chest and there are wires poking out of it and they’re not even fucking _finished_ yet but Peter thinks he can come to terms with that eventually. It’s not as if he has any other choice, right?

Exhaustion pulls at his eyelids, but Peter knows he probably shouldn’t sleep. Any minute now, Kinley and the other guards are going to come charging in here to drag him back to the operation table in order to finish the job. Submitting to his body’s needs will only make him feel more frustrated when it’s inevitably forced to a close sooner then it should be.

“Pete?” comes Finn’s voice, then. “Pete, are you going to pass out?”

“Mmm.” Peter digs the ball of his palms into his eyes. “No. I’m jus’ tired.”

Worry pinching his brows, Finn stands up to get a better look at Peter’s face. “No offence, but you look really shitty,” he says honestly. “You look like you’ve never slept a day in your life. Take a nap, Pete.”

“I’m fine,” he insists. “Really.”

Finn doesn’t reply to that. In fact, he doesn’t say anything to Peter right up until he’s shaking him back to consciousness, and even then his voice is but a whisper when drowned out by the thunderous thudding of steel-toed boots and the insensitive chatter of guards outside. “Peter,” he’s saying. “Peter, they’re coming for you. Wake up!”

Even though he doesn’t remember falling asleep in the first place, he’s definitely wide awake now. Within seconds he’s on his feet, adrenaline and innate anxiety causing him to overlook the aches in his body and the six-inch hole in his chest as the cell door swings open and Kinely appears clutching a blindfold. “You,” she snaps. “You eaten?”

“No,” Peter admits, hoping in the back of his mind that it might buy him more time to catch up on sleep.

“Sucks for you,” Kinley says simply. “Turn around.”

The last thing Peter sees before Kinely ties the blindfold over his eyes again is Finn’s grey eyes swimming in anxiety and terror for his cellmate. Though he hasn’t been Spiderman for a good five years, that same comedic nervous twitch is persistent, and he somehow finds the nerve to spit out, “you don’t hold back on the foreplay, do you?”

“Shut it,” Kinley snaps, but Peter can tell she’s at least a little bit amused by the remark because she doesn’t throw him against the wall or punch him in the face for talking out of term as she usually would. Or maybe she’s just being careful of the gaping hole in his chest. Either way, he’s not about to complain.

He’s shoved into a room that smells strongly of antiseptic and so he’s sure he’s inside of one of the operation rooms. As he’s being pushed onto the table and getting his limbs restricted behind those thick metal cuffs, he pays close attention to the changes in air pressure and temperature around him, probing for details of the room that he can’t see otherwise.

There’s two people standing by his feet - those are probably guards. There’s a body that smells of coconut shampoo to his left that is definitely Kinley, and there are two people moving around behind his head.

Not only that, but he can feel something’s off about the air. It reminds him vaguely of all those years ago when he’d stand outside to listen to the thunder roaring in the distance, getting louder and louder as it approaches, because he always thought that the air was pleasant when you could sense the electricity in the clouds.

That was one of those feelings that he enjoyed, though, and this one is not. No, it feels different. Darker. Maybe it’s because he’s definitely expecting something terrible and painful to happen to him within the next few minutes.

“Welcome back, Spider,” a voice says to him, sickeningly sweet. “Are you ready to complete the final stage of this upgrade?”

He doesn’t reply. He knows better than to do that.

“I’m sure you had no idea what was going on when you woke up to see a hole in your chest. I’m sure you were frightened and confused. Why, I think anyone would be,” it continues. “So maybe I owe an explanation to you, Spider. I know you think I’m the worst person in the world right now, most likely your least favourite on this planet, and I get that. I _appreciate_ that. But I’m not _cruel._ So I’ll tell you what’s going on, instead of leaving you in the dark.”

Peter... doesn’t know what he’s supposed to be feeling right now.

Something round and glowing a soft blue through the material of the blindfold appears before him. “This, here, is what you call an arc reactor, Spider,” the voice informs him. “You’d probably recognise that name if you really thought about it, but the soldiers never really remember much of their past like after the three-year mark in this dump. Especially not things on the news or anything like that.”

“Dump,” Kinley echoes.

“I’m not wrong,” the voice insists. “Anyway. The arc reactor is a completely independent and incredibly powerful power source. It needs no recharging, no constant replacement, no constant maintenance or hassle. It’s… well, it’s perfect, isn’t it?” 

A hand is on his chest, now, and a needle is pressed through his skin. “Numbing agent,” the voice elaborates. “Me digging in that hole to connect this thing is going to jar the extensive bruising on your… everywhere, and Kinley wants you recovered as soon as possible so you can start training with this bad boy.

  
“Spider, when this arc reactor is fully functional, you’re going to be the most powerful soldier within this entire organisation. You’re going to be our golden child. You’re going to be at the forefront of every glorious battle we embark on. You’re going to be the brains _and_ the brawl on every mission.” There’s a beat of silence and Peter twitches as a finger trails its way across his chin and down his jawline. “You’re going to be grateful when this is over, Spider. I promise you that now.

“Keep in mind that this arc reactor will do nothing when you are not armed with our… _special_ weaponry. Believe me, we did consider turning you into a cyborg and replacing your heart with this,” the voice jokes, but it isn’t funny.

Peter has to breath hard just to keep his composure. Out of everything this Hellhole of a facility has put him through - the constant training sessions; the rough, biased sparring; the chilling cold that he feels right down to the bone; the mind-numbing isolation, the rigorous starvation and the rigid metal beds that are unforgiving on their bodies - this has got to be the most terrifying moment of it all. Lying on an operating table, strapped down by thick metal cuffs, waiting for the six-inch hole in your chest to be filled with what could be the most powerful weapon in the _world._

And all for the ‘greater good’. 

‘It’s for the greater good,’ they’d say as they threw him in a cold, grey cell and left him in isolation for three years.

‘It’s for the greater good,’ they’d say as they put him up against kids who are just as terrified as he is in sparring sessions and wouldn’t let him out of the ring until he took down every last person they threw at him, no matter how beat up or close to death he was.

‘It’s for the greater good,’ they’d say as they slammed him up against walls or clock him in the face or threaten to slit his throat clean open with their knife for speaking what they consider as ‘out of term’.

What a fucking _joke._

“I know you’re not stupid, Spider. I know you’re quite the opposite. I know that you’re thinking that, with this, you’re going to be more powerful than all of us when you get your hands on that special weaponry. And perhaps you’re right, Spider, but I don’t think I have to remind you what we’re going to do to your lovely Auntie if you step out of line.”

At this, Peter’s heart plummets to his toes. The only reason he’s still pushing through this is his Aunt May. They keep promising he’ll finally get to see her if he behaves. They keep saying that he has to keep being good if he’s ever going to get to smell her shampoo or hear her tell him how much she loves him again. And if he’s bad, or he resists, or he tries to turn his back on them and run away…

… then she’ll not only be killed, but they’ll do it in the most painful way she can go.

They’ll _burn her alive._

Peter isn’t going to be the one who lets that happen.

The numbing agent they’d injected into his body comes into effect slowly and then all at once. He can feel that they’re touching him, shifting him, pushing down on him, but he can’t feel any pain and he can’t make sense of what it is they’re actually _doing._ The rational part of his brain tells him that, if not for anything else, then he should be at least grateful for _that_ luxury.

.

“Bingo!”

Clint, who’d been catching up on his sleep in the pilot’s chair, blinks himself awake again. “Bingo?” he echoes groggily. “That… that sounds like some good news, Tones.”

“Oh, it is. Come here.”

They haven’t left Moldova just yet. They had, however, decided to move away from the ominous collection of identical buildings and landed the Stark Jet (it’s just a new and improved Quinjet, really) in an area with a little more space - the very center of someone’s empty field, the grass seemingly gone to the wrapped bales of hay scattered about the place. There isn’t so much as a concrete road in sight.

With Natasha’s two-seater motorcycle and Sam’s wing pack, the others had gone to the nearest town to pick up something to eat for them all, leaving Tony and Clint onboard the jet to put their heads together and look into what was up with a butcher’s bullet-riddled van door they’d accidentally come across in the abandoned facility’s trash chute.

The archer practically rolls over the seat’s armrest and just about stumbles to where Tony is sat at the jet’s workspace, staring at the image displayed to him on a hologram.“What did ya find?”

“I found where the logo comes from.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Clint peers at the image. It shows a screenshot clearly taken from a security camera’s feed of a butcher’s store with what is indeed the same logo and catchphrase from the one they found on the van door. It looks like a nice enough store with dark red trimmings and a clean-looking, friendly interior. “You mean the butcher’s logo comes from a butcher’s store? Woah, Tony, you’re really making huge leaps in this investigation.”

“There has to be a reason why this organisation had one of their vans, right? Maybe this butcher’s store is what we need in this investigation to move forward.”

“I’m not sure,” Clint says uneasily, leaning down onto the back of Tony’s swivel chair. “What if they just… stole one of the vans? They shot the driver dead through the door, took it, and ripped the door off to replace it again. I don’t really know what else would be… you know, plausible.”

The billionaire sucks in a deep, sharp breath. “Possibly,” he says, “but what if you’re wrong?”

“Tony…”

“I don’t see any _other_ leads.”

“Tones… I’m not sure.”

“You’re beginning to sound like the Capcicle, you know.”

At this, the archer leans back on his heels to consider the proposal. Trying to link this perfectly innocent-looking butcher’s store with an entire underground crime ring that exploits children sounds like a bit of a stretch to him. What is Tony even expecting to find in there, if they were to take a chance and visit the place - a bright, flashing sign reading ‘WE ARE THE YELLOWJACKETS’?

There are a billion perfectly good reasons as to why that van door is in the place’s hidden trash chute. Clint isn’t sure that uncovering it is quite enough to warrant further investigation into that butcher’s store.

On the other hand, though, crime rings and gangs _have_ been known to be fronted by stores that look perfectly normal. Generally, it’s a mechanic’s workshop or a restaurant, but he supposes that there’s nothing ruling out that the front for this place, in particular, is a butcher. Besides, what other leads do they have? They might as well check it out while they’re in the country, right?

Clint claps Tony on the shoulder, startling him. “You know what? You’re right.”

“I always am.”

“Yeah, yeah.” The blond moves back to the cockpit, sliding into the pilot’s chair. He puts his finger to his ear to activate his special hearing aid’s inbuilt commlink. “Hey, guys. We found the butcher’s store where the van door came from.” He glances at the coordinates displayed on the navigation system that Tony must have punched it at some point. “It’s not too far. D’you feel like following us there?”

_“Yeah, uh,”_ Sam’s voice comes back to them, _“we found it too.”_

“Oh.” He turns to address Tony. “They already found it.”

The billionaire makes a tired face.

“We’re on our way,” Clint informs them moments before signing out of the commlink channel. “Can you believe they went and found it already? And they didn’t even think to tell us? Snakes. Snakes, the lot of ‘em.”

Tony collapses into the co-pilot’s chair. “Agreed.”

.

The butcher’s store is as pleasant in real life as it was in the image. The red trimmings complement the stark white paint of the building it resides in beautifully, with hanging baskets full of well-kept, colourful flowers decorating the exterior. The text across the window is printed in both Romanian and English and positively reads ‘the most reliable butcher’s store around!’.

Overall, a pretty normal looking place. Tony wouldn’t buy his meat from the place personally - as _if_ he’d spend less than a grand on the cuts he eats - but it looks as if it’s the sort of place the local low to middle classes would get their ‘fancy, elegant’ dinner meat from.

Tony and Clint had landed the jet where it’s hidden from view by a healthy forest of trees in a field and met the remainder of the group where they’d been drinking coffee across the street from the butcher’s after updating the team they’d left at home on their discoveries. Bruce had been particularly interested in their hypothesis regarding what the butcher’s store had to do with all of this. Tony doesn’t remember why.

“This is a nice town,” Natasha comments absently, sipping at her coffee. “Very quiet compared to New York.”

“That’s because it’s in the middle of nowhere,” Tony says. “I can’t imagine it’s very interesting living here.”

With a withering sigh, Sam puts down his empty coffee cup. “Anywhere _you_ live would automatically be interesting.”

“Is that supposed to be an insult?”

“Guys,” Steve says harshly, and everybody is immediately silenced by the way his voice demands order and attention, “let’s focus. The butcher’s store we’re after is right across the street but we still have no game plan. We can’t just charge in and demand to know what we want to know. We have to go about this smartly.”

The team throws ideas here and there, but ultimately, there’s nothing particularly clear or absolute that they can do to confirm their suspicions. Steve is right - they can’t just go in and wing it because, if they’re actually right and the butcher’s store is closely connected to the organisation they’re looking to take down, the last thing they want to do is put their plan out for everybody to see like that.

They continue like this for a good five minutes before JARVIS finally pipes up in Tony’s earpiece and helpfully asks whether he would like to listen to the conversation engaging between the employees.

“JARVIS is the smartest Avenger,” Clint declares as soon as Tony communicates this to the others. Nobody, not even the AI’s creator, dares to disprove the claim.

“Put the feed through our commlink channel and record it for later, J.”

“Yes, Sir.”

It’s then that their commlinks collectively buzz to life and the deep, booming voices of the men behind the counter are speaking into their ears. It doesn’t take Tony long to realise that they’re not speaking in English but in Romanian instead. He’s never been more grateful for his father’s obsession with a strong, high-quality education.

_“Here you go. That’s an especially good one, you know. Give it a good couple of hours to roast until it is brown and crispy and it will be the perfect chicken for your dinner party. Have a good day.”_

_“Thank you. This one is bigger than the last one I got was. And it’s the same price?”_

_“Yes. We changed our chicken supplier to a farmer with bigger birds but we don’t need to change the price. That’s just pointless.”_

_“Your slogan really is true. Have a good day, sir.”_

Clint pulls a face. “It’s like we’re watching a commercial being filmed. It’s so freaky and robotic.”

“Didn’t know JARVIS did real-time translation,” Sam comments, mildly impressed. “He definitely is the smartest Avenger, huh?”

“Be quiet,” Steve demands. Everybody obliges.

They watch the woman the employee had been speaking to as she leaves the store, her chicken packaged, bagged and in hand. Unless it’s a weird scheme set up by the Yellowjackets in order to seem entirely average to outsiders, it seems as if the butchers is pretty well-known and reliable within the community. Tony bites his knuckle - his hypothesis is seeming less and less likely with every passing moment.

This normal, everyday butcher’s store drivel continues for another two customers before Tony thinks he hears the word ‘reactor’ and almost snaps his spine, what with how quickly he sits upright. Everybody else must have also heard it because when he looks around at them, he can practically see the cogs turning in their brains.

_“They did it?”_

_“Yeah. They put it in,”_ the second one mutters.

_“Didn’t the first kid they put it in die?”_

_“Blood loss. It was a shame. He had been a good, strong soldier.”_

The first one hums. _“So how did the next one live through it?”_

_“I don’t know. I didn’t hear much else. But they say that if he wasn’t super before, he definitely will be now.”_

Tony’s first thought upon hearing this was ‘yes! I was right!’ and he almost feels guilty about it. If anything, this is good news - it means that they’re on the dot. It means that they’re a billion steps closer to finding out just where these Yellowjacket bastards are based. It means that they have a connection to the _inside._ And on the off-chance that this conversation is entirely unrelated to what they’re after, then they’re definitely doing _something_ evil in there.

He looks around to the others. At a nearly unnatural speed, Natasha is writing down notes onto a notepad that she seems to have produced out of nowhere. Tony doesn’t really feel like telling her that the conversation is being recorded for later use by JARVIS anyway.

_“That’s frightening. He could kill us all.”_

_“He could. But I don’t think that they would give this technology to him if they didn’t have some kind of leverage or method of keeping him under control. I don’t think he’s anything to worry about. He’s working for us, remember?”_

_“That doesn’t comfort me, you know.”_

_“Whoops.”_ The man has the nerve to laugh. _“Don’t worry about him. We don’t have anything to do with what goes on over there. Why would the kid come after us?”_

_“I guess you’re right about that.”_ There’s a beat of silence. _“Do you know his name?”_

_“No. I’m too afraid to ask. Kinley is a demon.”_

_“Fair enough. Fair enough.”_

A customer walks into the store asking for some bacon rashers for their breakfast tomorrow, then, and the team listen for another five minutes before collectively deciding that they’re not going to get any more useful information out of the two men behind the counter today.

“That’s…” Steve swallows. “A lot.”

“This is a good thing,” Tony states.

Sam looks at the billionaire as if he’d just spoken in Simlish. “They killed a kid, Tony,” he spits, “and probably loads more. How’s that a good thing?”

“I don’t mean _that_ part, birdbrain. This is a good thing because we now know that this butcher’s store is closely connected with the organisation we’re _looking_ for.” Feeling satisfied, Tony leans back into his chair and cracks his knuckles. “Now it’s just down to finding a way of taking them down without destroying an entire country accidentally.”

“We do that a lot,” Sam comments absently.

“As much as I hate to say these words,” Natasha begins from where she’d been quietly observing, “Stark is right. We have a link to the organisation. The information we got is just way too coincidental for it to be anything _other_ than the Yellowjackets.”

Collecting the empty coffee cups and leaning over to put them in a trash can, Steve stands up. “Back to the jet we go,” he says decidedly. “Can we try and find a hotel to live in or is it smarter to stay in the jet just in case we need to make a quick escape?”

“Let’s stay in the jet until we come up with an action plan and see where we can go from there,” Clint suggests.

“Sure. Let’s go.”

Ten minutes into their serene amble to the field where the jet was parked, Clint falls to the back of the group where Sam is walking by himself. “I feel like we’re living in the book of an author with lazy writing. Am I the only one finding it weird that the men happened to be discussing exactly what we needed them to be just as we listened in?”

.

Everything is dark again. Peter just sighs and takes off the blindfold himself. The familiar ceiling of his cell glares back at him. “Good morning,” he says sluggishly into the space.

“Oh, shit,” comes a voice. “You scared me, Pete.”

“Mmm.”

He doesn’t move. Finn appears above him, grey eyes not only foggy with innate anxiety but also with curiosity. “You seem a lot more awake than you were the other day,” he observes, “but I don't think the surgery this time was nearly as intense. Your bruises are just about going yellow now. They were purple and black only yesterday. Did they have you on a drip?”

Peter doesn’t remember falling asleep, but he doesn’t remember anything that happened past being put down on the operation table, either. The loss of memory doesn’t bother him as much as it used to. It was frustrating before, but it’s probably a luxury by now.

“I dunno,” he mumbles honestly. “How long… how long was I gone this time?”

“Half a day, I think,” Finn informs him. “I had training while you were gone. It was strange without you.”

At this, Peter’s eyes sweep over the younger boy. He doesn’t look as wounded as he could right now, but the dark bruises on his forearms and the cuts on his cheeks is enough to make anger resonate inside of him like heat from a flame. “The cuts aren’t bleeding,” Peter notices out loud. “Or turning green. Did they clean you up?”

“Kinley used an antiseptic wipe. They had plasters on them before, but she said I should take them off after an hour because they need air. She said they didn’t have the supplies right now to look after me if they got infected and I got sick.”

Peter hums. “‘s nice of her.”

“Yeah. It was.”

“You okay?”

“Yeah. Are you?”

“My fashionable chest hole hurts,” Peter jokes, trying to lighten the mood.

Finn’s expression changes, then. “There’s no easy way to say this,” he says nervously, “but, um, your fashionable chest hole is glowing now.”

This is absolutely jarring to Peter, who sits up against the wall within an instant and pulls down the neck of his tattered shirt so hard that it tears. In the place where that six-inch metal casing had been is now a round disk that glows a bright, electric blue.

Feeling numb, Peter raps on it with a bent finger. It makes a solid thunk, meaning that it’s something that fills up all six of those inches and not something that is on top. He doesn’t know how he feels about knowing that there’s a piece of technology sitting so deep inside of his fucking body. He doesn’t know at all.

“Oh,” is all he says.

What else is he supposed to say?

“Pete?” Finn says carefully. “Are you okay?”

After the whole ‘hole in his chest’ thing, Peter finds it’s strangely much easier to come to terms with the fact that the hole is now, in fact, filled. He isn’t sure what it’s filled with, really, and he has no idea what this is going to do for him, but he knows that fretting over it isn’t going to be useful to him in the long run.

“Pete?”

“This is…” Peter swallows. Nods. “Unexpected.”

Finn chews at his bottom lip; another one of his nervous habits reserved for when he’s thinking of the right thing to say. “It looks… it looks kind of badass,” he says eventually. It’s not at all what Peter was expecting, but he can’t say he’s mad about it. “You- you know who you remind me of right now?”

“Who?”

“You look like fuckin’ Iron Man.”

And that’s when Peter realises just what this mysterious glowing disk actually fucking is.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> KEEP IN MIND THAT MAY PARKER IS ALREADY DEAD.  
> comments would be really encouraging and appreciated pals!!!
> 
> MY DISCORD SERVER:  
> https://discord.gg/SgGFvDC
> 
> MY TUMBLR:  
> https://spicyjarvis.tumblr.com/


	5. CHAPTER FOUR

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for the wait! i started college. :)

The plan they eventually formulate is in no way stable nor can it guarantee them the results they’re looking for, but they’ve been getting pretty good at winging it lately, so they decide to give it a shot anyway.

Clint curiously peers over Sam’s shoulder to look at Redwing’s camera feed, which is displayed on a hologram projecting from the wrist cuff Tony had produced out of some box inside of the jet. It shows the same image it had ten minutes ago when he’d last checked it out; an aerial view of the butcher’s store, the activity of which being much slower than it was earlier as closing time nears.

With enough coincidental evidence at hand to prove that they work with the Yellowjackets, they’re hoping they can catch where the two men behind the counter go after their shift in the butcher’s store. With luck, they’ll go straight to the main facility, therefore giving the team a precise location as to where their base of operations is.

“This is boring,” the marksman announces, collapsing onto the grass with a huff.

The team are all sitting in the middle of a field, the Stark Jet parked only a couple hundred meters away. Above them, the setting sun paints brilliant colours of orange and deep, velvet blue, white stars beginning to dot the vast expanse of sky. A chilly breeze sweeps through the dewy grass and plays with their hair.

Natasha shivers into her jacket. “It’s cold.”

“No shit,” Clint mutters under his breath.

Tony scrolls through Twitter, glancing occasionally at Redwing’s camera feed which is helpfully projected on his own wrist cuff as well as Sam’s. He’s hyper-aware of how wrong their plan can go - Redwing could be noticed and attacked; the men could go somewhere else and they’d end up raiding the wrong location; they could not even leave the shop if they happened to live on the floor above it.

If it were to go well and they do actually discover the Yellowjacket’s base of operations today, they don’t plan to raid it just yet. Even as a man who likes to act quickly no matter what the cost is, he appreciates that they’re going to need a decent plan and formidable back-up if they’re going to be successful. They’d have to go home to collect supplies and the rest of their team before they did anything.

“Just stick it out for a bit, guys,” Steve says. “The store should close in five minutes. It shouldn’t be too much longer.”

“I hope you’re right,” Clint says.

He wasn’t.

Five minutes pass and they haven’t left the store yet. Sam and Clint are beginning to get bored and start bantering between themselves instead of paying full attention to the camera feed, while Natasha and Steve remain characteristically vigilant on the task at hand. Tony periodically switches from Twitter onto Instagram and back again.

Another fifteen minutes sees Clint lying down on the grass, squinting into the vast stretch of deep sky above him. Using the sharpshooter’s stomach as a headrest, Sam continues to stare emptily at the camera feed. Even Natasha and Steve are beginning to grow weary and talk in low mutters between themselves. Tony focuses on balancing his phone on his finger instead of on the task.

“I don’t think they’re leaving,” Steve says after a couple of minutes.

“Yeah,” Sam hums. “It’s been like, half an hour.”

The entire team looks downtrodden and unmotivated. Especially Clint, Tony observes, who’s closer to this case than anyone else between them. “You know what?” he starts. Everybody looks up at him. “Let’s go get a hot drink.”

.

“Guards?” Finn hammers on the cell door. “Guards!”

“Shut it,” drones a voice from outside. “It’s early. People are trying to sleep.”

Finn hasn’t known what the time is since he got to the facility three years ago and so he hardly cares about whether or not people are sleeping. Worriedly glancing back at Peter, he decides that this  _ can’t  _ wait until everybody is awake.

“It’s an emergency!” he tries.

“What, you shit your pants or somethin’?” another voice snickers.

Finn swallows. “It’s Peter,” he says. “The thing in his chest… I think it’s killing him.”

“Who?”

“Peter. Um, Spider. Pl- please help him. Please!”

The door unlocks with an audible click and the two guards push past Finn to Peter, who’s still lying on his bed. “He looks fuckin’ terrible,” one of them mutters. “Is that meant to be flashing like that?”

“Don’t think so,” the other one says.

The older boy had woken Finn up not too long ago with fits of rough, throaty coughing. At first, Finn had simply brushed it off and rolled over to go back to sleep - they just about clean these cells once a month and so it’s not unusual to inhale some dust accidentally while you’re asleep - but then he’d spied the spots of blood on Peter’s pillow.

He’s stopped coughing so much by now, but his breathing sounds laboured and raspy. There’s a thick layer of sweat covering his skin and he seems too weak to keep his eyes open because he’s taken to just lying on his bed, left arm resting across his eyes. The disk in his chest is no longer glowing a steady blue but is now flickering and flashing.

“How much d’you know about this thing?” Guard One demands, looking at Finn.

“I- I don’t know much.”

Guard Two puts a finger to his ear. “We need a stretcher for the Spider, stat,” he says into what Finn assumes is a communicator. “Something isn’t right. He’s sickly and the thing in his chest is flickering and flashing. Hurry!”

Within a couple of minutes, two medical staff appear at the cell brandishing a stretcher between the two of them. They unceremoniously dump Peter’s motionless body onto it and Guard Two secures the straps around his torso as well as the leather cuffs on his wrists as they’re leaving. “He’ll be okay,” one of the medical staff offers Finn as they’re closing the door behind them. “He’ll be back in no time.”

While Finn appreciates the comfort, he’s all too aware that there is a big possibility that Peter won’t make it. If there’s one thing that this Hellhole of a facility has taught him, it’s that nobody actually cares for the person, but about what that person can do under their command for them instead. The moment Peter becomes useless to them, they won’t bother trying to find an alternative life for him - they’ll just kill him.

Another thing that this place has taught him over the years he’s been here is that Peter is an extremely tough human being. Not just because of his superhuman strength, his lightning reflexes, his creepy sixth sense or his ability to stick to walls, but also because he’s put up with so much and gone through so much shit and he’s still kicking. It’s admirable.

This seems bleak for Peter, but Finn doesn’t doubt that he’ll come out of whatever is happening with that fire still in his eyes. After all, believing in him is all he can really do for him. He might as well do it with his whole heart.

.

“I do not understand,” Doctor Rodrigo Juravschi whines. “I put it in perfectly. I followed every step! Surely, this is not my fault!”

“This blueprint was stolen from the Iron Man’s workshop itself,” Kinley deadpans, waving the rolled sheet of paper at the doctor’s face. “The blueprint  _ must _ be correct. It could only be  _ you _ who got it wrong.”

“Or maybe it was my team,” Juravschi says.

The only other medical staff member in the room, who’s busy setting up the heart monitor, looks up and blinks owlishly. Kinley smiles and shakes her head at the woman. “Don’t put this on your team, Juravschi. Fix this.”

“You’re not as cold-hearted as they say, are you?” Juravschi comments.

“Get on with it.”

Making a face, the doctor stoops over the boy lying motionless on the infirmary bed. He looks as if he isn’t quite sure what he’s looking for and Kinley is sure that’s probably true. He raps awkwardly on the arc reactor with a tenderly curled fist. It continues to flicker at him in response. “I could only discover the root of the problem if I operate again,” he says.

“Then operate again,” Kinley demands.

Juravschi spares a glance at the heart monitor. “He is too weak. He will die if I operate again.”

“He’ll die if you don’t.”

The doctor squeezes his eyes closed. “Kinley,” he begins, “I do not think you understand. That is okay. I think that this problem is not to do with the arc reactor - although the flickering light certainly is concerning, I do not think that is related to what is harming the Spider. I think that what is harming the Spider is something to do with the metal casing. I think it is interfering with his heart.”

“What are we going to do about it?”

“I think our best chance of ensuring his survival in this... admittedly  _ bleak  _ situation is putting him into a medically-induced coma and feeding him via PEG instead of IV fluids. If we are lucky, his organs will stabilise and he will be strong enough for us to operate.”

“PEG?”

“Percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy!” the doctor states. “A very uninteresting procedure, if you ask me. It allows a patient to receive nutrition who cannot take food orally. This boy in particular has an extremely advanced metabolism; the fastest I have ever come across. He has not been getting enough food as it is. He will need a stronger diet if he is to strengthen.”

Kinley scribbles that down on her pocket notepad. Juravschi continues, “I will put him under and then perform an x-ray on him to see if my hypothesis is correct. There is some bad news, Kinley. I do think you know what I mean, yes?”

“Unfortunately,” Kinley murmurs.

It’s common knowledge within the Yellowjacket ranks that anybody under treatment and becoming useless will be killed off. In her superior’s point of view, any soldier - intriguing spider abilities or not - using up too much time and money is not worth it. She has wondered, since the first time she saw a strong, intelligent and well-mannered soldier killed for not being able to recover from paralysis within a couple of days, if their opinion would change if they actually  _ met _ a couple of the soldiers they have diction over.

“I am not a cruel man, Kinley,” Juravschi says into the pregnant silence. “Nor am I stupid or oblivious. I can see that you do not wish to see him killed like the others. I can see that you do not want this life for this boy. I am correct, yes?”

Kinley says nothing.

The doctor, watching her face carefully, continues. “I have seen the way you care for him and the boy in his cell with him. It is subtle. I applaud you for that. One evening, I overheard three guards talking about how you, and I quote, ‘ruined their fun’ by stopping them from tasering the boys during their free time. Do you remember that? Not many people around here would do that for them. I admit, I don’t think I would have at the time.

“The superiors do not like to share who is getting executed with a lot of people. They will most likely not tell you in advance, but afterwards, when you ask after the Spider’s whereabouts. However, as I am assigned as his doctor, I will be the one to administer the shot. The preparations needed to do this - especially for him - will take a couple of days, meaning they will tell me a good while before they want to see him dead and out of the way…”

It takes Kinely a minute to figure out just what Juravschi is implying and she’s suddenly swimming in an overwhelming ocean of hope. “Tell me as soon as you know,” she demands, turning to leave the infirmary.

“Hey,” Juravschi says, and she pauses. There’s a gloved hand on her shoulder. “Make sure he will be in the right hands.”

Kinley nods. “You know I will.”

.

The woman who sits quietly across the coffee shop from Tony and the rest of the team is doing nothing that incriminates her, but Tony has come across enough shady strangers in his lifetime to be able to identify when a stranger is, in fact, shady.

No one else can see it. They are all bantering about something else, something Tony hasn’t really been paying attention to for a good five minutes now. After the failure of their initial plan, the team decided they would refuel with an obscene amount of coffee, find a hotel not too far away to sleep away the rest of the night in, and come back to it tomorrow with refreshed brains.

Tony watches the stranger out of the corner of his eye and pretends to be listening to whatever stupid anecdote Sam and Clint are giggling out. He cannot see much from where he sits, but he can see that she is a muscular woman with long hair pulled back into a loose bun on the back of her head. Her eyes are hidden by dark sunglasses despite the fact that it’s getting close to dark outside - a very Tony Stark-esque thing to wear, but a red flag anyway.

“Stark,” Natasha says.

“Hm?”

“You’ve been quiet. Are you okay?”

“Yeah, you haven’t made one rich person joke, like, all day,” Sam points out.

The billionaire straightens his back and looks to Natasha. She’s watching him carefully, trained eyes combing over his face and body, searching for anything that could be the problem. “I’m alright. I think lack of sleep and the travel is getting to me,” he says.

Natasha squints suspiciously.

It’s then that Steve stands up, his entire body weight leaning forward on his palms, which lie flat on the table. “It’s getting dark,” he informs the group, and ignores Sam when he squints comically at the window so as to let the supersoldier know that he did, in fact, notice. “We should probably go find somewhere to sleep for the night.”

“Somewhere nice,” Natasha says.

Tony can feel Clint’s eyes on him. “With a nice shower,” the marksman says.

As everyone starts to get up and prepare themselves for the walk back to Jet to drop off their valuables, Tony finds his eyes gravitating again towards the sunglasses-clad woman in the corner. There’s something about her that draws Tony towards her, something he cannot even hope to describe. It’s like she’s asking him to come to her without even  _ moving. _

His hand anxiously runs over the solid glowing plate under his shirt. “I’ll catch up, you guys,” he says to the team, in response to the enquiring looks they’re giving him. “I’m going to grab a coffee for the road. Anyone want anything?”

“I’ll take another one of,” Sam peers into his empty cup, “these.”

“Me too,” Clint pipes up.

Natasha shakes her head, as does Steve. “I’m good,” the supersolider says. “Meet us at the Jet if you don’t catch us on our way there, okay?”

It takes Tony a couple of seconds to realise that he’s being directly spoken to. “Oh. Err, sure. Sure. I’ll be right there.”

As the team leave the shop, Tony is sure he hears Natasha murmur, “don’t you guys think he’s been acting weird?” but he doesn’t think too much about it. He’s too preoccupied with that strange, suspicious woman.

Tony Stark is notorious for the copious amount of knowledge piled up, barely organised and bouncing around like a DVD screensaver in his brain, but for the first time in quite a while, he positively does know what to expect when it comes to this woman. Does she even want to talk to him? Has he been misunderstanding everything and she actually wants nothing to do with him?

He comes across as way more confident than he actually is as he makes his way over. The woman only looks up to acknowledge him moments before he moves to sit opposite her. Tony can see her face properly now - her skin is absolutely flawless and behind her shades sit intense grey eyes that bore a hole into Tony’s very soul. “I was waiting for you,” a smooth Romanian accent says. Her voice is serious. Cold. “You’re Tony Stark. Correct?”

“I’ve met fans before, but none as unhappy to see me as you are,” Tony jokes nervously.

“So I’m correct,” the woman confirms to herself. “I’ve heard that you’re quite big-headed.”

“Sorry, who are you?”

“You can’t know my name,” she says to him. “It puts me and my family in danger. When they find out what I’m about to do, anyway.”

Fear trickles into his chest, drop by drop. This interaction is starting to feel more and more like a set-up to assassinate him with every second that passes. “Update me. What  _ is _ it that you’re about to do?”

Even from behind the sunglasses, the woman’s level gaze takes an inescapable hold of Tony’s eyes. He finds himself unable to look away, as if he were put under some sort of strange spell. Whoever this person is, she definitely is not someone he should fuck around with. “I need you to help me.”

“With… what, exactly?”

“Take this.” She slides a square piece of battered paper across the table. “As fast as you can. Now. Please help him.”

Tony takes the paper, but doesn’t dare to look at it yet. Still entrapped by the woman’s stare, he murmurs, “with… who? Who am I helping?”

“You’ll see.”

The billionaire glances nervously down at the piece of paper. “This better not be a trap,” he mutters, more to himself than anyone else. Then, addressing the woman, “I’ll be so mad if this is a trap, lady, let me tell you that.”

“It isn’t a trap,” she insists.

“How can I trust you?”

“You’ll just have to take that chance.” The woman shifts forward and glances around. She’s looking around to see if anyone undesirable is listening - Tony is a veteran to shady strangers. “Please. Help him. He is dying. My superiors want him killed off because they do not want to help him.” There are cracks at the edge of her intense demeanour that reveal something softer. “He’s special. I don’t want that for him.”

There are not many things that bewilder Tony, but it’s safe to say that this particular situation definitely does. It’s not every day that some random lady lumbers some dying child hidden in a strange, suspicious secondary location onto him.

It most definitely _ feels _ like a trap, but Tony looks at this woman and the tension in her body and the determination set in her eyes and thinks that maybe it’s worth just going to make sure. He can deal with whatever hits him when he gets there.

In a way, he almost wishes it  _ is  _ a trap. He’s had plenty of experiences with them before and he’s come out okay. But what is he meant to do with some random dying child? He’s never really hung out with children very much. He doesn’t know what they like to do, how they tend to behave and what on earth he’s supposed to give it in terms of entertainment. And the fact that it is apparently leaning into its grave just loads a hundred times the responsibility on top of that.

“He’s special,” Tony repeats, edging for elaboration.

“You’ll see,” the woman tells him. “You’ll see.”

And with that, she’s on her feet and heading to the door. She moves so quickly that Tony barely manages to scramble out of the booth and stop her before she’s out of the shop completely. “What do you mean by that?” he demands. “What’s so special about this kid?”

The woman’s eyes comb him up and down, faltering as they cross his chest. “Save him,” is all she offers, before she pushes her way out of the door and disappears down the street, pooled in the very last golden stretches of the setting sun.

.

_ “What the Hell, Stark?” _

Inside of the suit, Tony winces. Natasha sounds mad - and that never works out well for anyone. “I know it’s last minute,” he tries to reassure them, “but it’s really important. If it’s what I think it is, then we’ll definitely be busy.”

_ “Busy?”  _ Sam echoes.  _ “Busy with what?” _

_ “Anything to do with the Yellowjackets?”  _ comes Clint, sounding hopeful.

“I don’t know,” Tony replies. “I’ll update you as soon as I know.”

The others rush to object, but Tony asks JARVIS to turn off the commlink before they can even finish. He glances down at the scenery passing underneath him as he flies; at the blurry meadows and crop fields and clumps of housing and highways that hum with the headlights of cars. Moldova really is a lovely country - it’s just a shame he’s here to bust an underground criminal organisation and not just to vacation.

After a couple more minutes of peaceful flying, JARVIS tells Tony that he has arrived at the address written on that piece of paper given to him by the mysterious stranger in the coffee shop and highlights it in front of him.

The building he ends up in front of is,externally, much like the one him and the rest of the team initially tried to scope out for clues as to the Yellowjackets’ whereabouts when they first arrived in Moldova. The vast metal door shudders in the gentle evening breeze. When he takes a step forward, his suit’s large boot disturbs a collection of shiny beetles, who scatter and escape into the cracks in the ground.

“You’re sure this is the right place?” he asks JARVIS.

“Yes, Sir.”

Tony breathes in deeply. He’d been kind of hoping that somehow his AI  _ had  _ gotten the location wrong and that the address  _ actually  _ lead to a nice, warm building with this random dying child just sitting in a chair waiting patiently for him. “Well, here goes nothing,” he says to himself, and pulls the door open.

The very moment he slips underneath it, it slams shut behind him, leaving him in complete and utter darkness. Instead of turning on night vision as he would have usually, he dials up the brightness of every source of light on his suit, using the beam the repulsors on his palms to light up the room around him. There’s either a dying kid or something ready to ambush him in here - he might as well let them see him first.

The initial sweep he gives the room draws the conclusion that, if there was a team of people ready to pounce at him, they’re very good at hiding. He looks for a light switch too but there doesn’t even seem to be any lights in the first place, so that’s a dead end.

“Scan the room for traps,” he asks JARVIS.

He takes a couple minutes, but ultimately comes back to Tony with an update informing him that the room is, in fact, safe of anything lethal. “However,” the AI continues, “there is an unconscious lifeform twelve meters to your left.”

At this, a spike of anxiety drums at Tony’s heart and stomach. The woman was right - there’s a dying kid here and he’s apparently the only one who will know what to do with him. “Shit, shit, shit,” he mutters under his breath as he walks to his left, towards the motionless blob that JARVIS helpfully highlighted for him.

He sweeps his repulsor beam over the spot. As expected, there’s a body wrapped in a thin blanket lying still against a sheet of corrugated iron resting against the wall. He’s completely still - so still, in fact, that Tony thinks that he might already be dead. “Is he alive?” he asks JARVIS. “Bring up his vitals.”

The AI obliges. They’re not looking good, not at all, and Tony feels like there’s something lodged in the back of his throat. He has a heart rate of someone close to death and, when he listens closely, he can hear that his breathing is raspy and uneven. The way that his arms subconsciously squeeze his chest tells the billionaire that he’s a good amount of pain.

“Looks like the Green Giant back home is going to be busy,” he mutters.

Even though every sense in his body is telling him that he’s safer if he stays inside of the suit, he asks JARVIS to open it anyway. He stoops down to get a better look at the boy, to see the extent of what he’s dealing with his own two eyes.

He looks young, with subtle signs of malnourishment in his cheekbones, but only to the point where he just hasn’t been getting enough over a long period of time and not far enough to be fatal. Dirt clumps and grease sit in his hair but it looks as if it had been trimmed recently, telling Tony that he hasn’t exactly been living in the muck for ages as he would have expected.

Mottled bruises of black, purple and yellow are speckled nearly everywhere he can see. Tony feels sick when he spies the hand-shaped bruises on the boy’s arms and the particularly black ones across his collarbones, just peeking out from under his grey shirt.

“Shit,” he mumbles, pushing some hair out of the boy’s eyes.

It’s terrifying, seeing someone this young so battered and bruised. Not only because he has no idea whether the kid will pull through before he manages to get him back to the Tower where he has reliable medical supplies and doctors, but also because it makes him realise that there are people out there who will do this to people without so much as batting an eyelid.

He moves to shift the boy so he’s lying on his back instead of on his side simply so that it’s easier to pick him up, but his arms fall away from his chest and the disc of blue light that flickers at Tony is enough to send him reeling backwards out of shock.

“Is that an arc reactor?” he asks JARVIS, anxiously rubbing his hands over his stubble.

“I believe it is, Sir.”

Tony blinks. He blinks, and then he blinks again, because he’s sure that what he’s looking at is nothing more than a hallucination. There’s no way that this random kid lying in this empty warehouse has an arc reactor. He never released the plans to that technology because it’s too powerful when put in the wrong hands. No one else should have the blueprints.

It’s then that Tony suddenly remembers what was stolen from him not too long ago and who it was stolen  _ by  _ and he’s rubbing at his stubble harder, fresh nervous energy pumping through his veins.

Which means...

  
“You have got to be fucking kidding,” he mutters to nobody in particular, as he scoops up the bundle of unconscious kid in his arms. “You have  _ got  _ to be  _ kidding  _ me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hope this chapter is okay... it doesn't sit well with me?  
> comments would be super cool & they motivate me a whole lot. <3
> 
> MY DISCORD SERVER:  
> https://discord.gg/SgGFvDC
> 
> MY TUMBLR:  
> https://spicyjarvis.tumblr.com/


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